–
The financial sector has undergone significant changes in the past few years. As new players, fintechs are putting pressure on traditional financial institutions, and customer behavior has changed fundamentally. Today, banking and insurance customers are more informed and more willing than ever to switch. If they are no longer satisfied with the products and services of their provider, they quickly migrate to the competition – after all, they are only a few mouse clicks away.
Differentiating yourself is becoming more and more difficult. Almost every bank today offers its customers mobile access to their current account and practically every insurance company makes its policies clearly available on an online portal. An optimal customer experience has developed from something unique to a hygiene factor in recent years.
So how can financial institutions differentiate themselves from the competition under these circumstances? By taking the next step in terms of customer experience and offering their customers real added value. You can start at four central points:
Optimize continuously. Products and services launched today are likely to be out of date tomorrow. That is why they should always be critically examined and adapted to the wishes and needs of the customers. What are your requirements and how would you like to manage your financial affairs? When answering these questions, financial institutions should not shy away from new approaches and rely on new technologies such as blockchain.
Rely on cooperation. The IT of many financial institutions still consists of individual silos: departments with their own systems that hardly exchange data with one another. The result: Customers have to provide their data several times and not all departments are up to date with the current status of the customer journey. The elimination of these silos is therefore a crucial prerequisite for optimally serving customers. But cooperation with external partners can also help. For example, financial institutions can react to the increasing demand for sustainable financial products by cooperating with environmental or climate protection organizations.
Ensure flexibility and scalability. When it comes to new products and services, it is crucial to bring them to market quickly. This requires flexible and scalable IT systems. Therefore, financial institutions should consider moving away from their on-premises environments and at least partially migrating their systems to the cloud. Local servers are not only expensive and time-consuming to maintain – they also have limitations in terms of flexibility and scalability. The cloud, on the other hand, enables financial institutions to react quickly to increasing data traffic and to access customer data in real time.
Collect customer data and make it transparent. Extensive data is generated in the interactions between financial institutions and their customers. They can be used to optimize your own services and financial products and better adapt them to customer expectations. When financial institutions collect this data and make it transparent, they get a complete picture of their customers and can proactively address their needs. Tools such as no- / low-code platforms help them to make the large amounts of customer data more accessible and usable for all relevant stakeholders in the company – and to use them specifically to create real customer added value.
– .